FOR at least 10 people out of the millions of regular viewers, All Our Yesterdays will become a heartbreak programme on Monday.

Ten more widows, mothers, sisters, brothers and friends will see their loved ones wave farewell and give the thumbs-up sign in one of those cheery newsreel films of 25 years ago. Laughing troops who were later to die in action.

Every week on average, 10 people write to the All Our Yesterdays office asking for pictures of their dear departed.

Brian Inglis and producer Bill Grundy are aware of the heartbreak this weekly peep into the past can bring. They have weighed the cost and decided that this is one of the penalties that must be paid for the privilege of telling the story of Britain’s part in the Second World War.

Bill Grundy told me: “People are always writing to say I got a terrible shock last night when I saw my husband. Please try to let me have a picture of him. After that newsreel shot he was never seen again.’

“And, of course, within reason, we try to satisfy these requests. We have to confine ourselves to outstanding cases. Widows who ask for photographs of their husbands naturally get priority.

“It calls for a weekly picture hunt and a bit of detective work. We have to identify the face, track down the exact frame from thousands of feet of film, and get the picture enlarged.”

As the programme bites deeper into the war, Bill and company are preparing for more photo requests.

Going through the All Our Yesterdays postbag, I found the letters strange as well as nostalgic. A Welshman living in Oxford wrote to say that the war years were the happiest of his life.

He asked for a newsreel picture of his friends singing in the N.A.A.F.I. He wrote: “I am an invalid who has been desperately unlucky in life as a child and as a postwar adult.”

One of the most moving newsreel sequences showed a British European Forces platoon tramping through the snow in France. All Our Yesterdays received a request for pictures of every man in the platoon.

Not one of them had survived. But not one had been forgotten.

An infantryman wrote for a picture of a French farmyard near Gorre. “While I was sheltering from an air-raid,” he wrote, “a jagged chunk of shrapnel ricochettcd off the cobblestones and killed the man next to me.

“He was a Roman Catholic padre from Birkenhead. I want the picture to send to his sister.”

Often, it’s an innocent, cheery looking newsreel shot that brings the memories flooding back. Former RAF Flight Lieutenant Harold Perry, of Thornber Grove, Blackpool, saw himself and his crew clamber out of a battered bomber at Villeneuve, France.

The film was shot in March, 1940, after a typically hair-raising war incident. Mr. Perry takes up the story: “I was a wireless operator in the Whitley Mark V bomber. We had been on a fact-finding mission over Warsaw and landed by mistake at Saarbrucken, 15 kilometres behind enemy lines.

“The bullets began to fly as we tried to take off again on a very short runway. Luckily a drainage trench had been dug across the fields, and when the old Whitley hit it, we literally bounced off the ground.

“The Germans threw everything at us, but we managed to get away by some very fine ‘grass-cutting’ 3ft. above the ground.

I wrote because I am the only survivor of the crew of Old Queenie. We got back safely, but the rest of the boys were killed or reported missing on subsequent missions.”

And so the letters go on. Behind almost every incident and every face in the crowd featured in those newsreel films of 25 years ago is another story to match it in courage or sadness.

The post Pictures from the past appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

WILLIAM JOYCE was brought up as an Irish country boy but by the time of his death at the age of 39 he had become — next to Hitler — the most hated man in World War II.

The grotesque mouthpiece of the Third Reich (as far as England was concerned, he was the only ‘German’ who spoke directly to us), was known as Lord Haw-Haw. His story is told in Monday’s All Our Yesterdays.

Joyce, an insular, home-loving traitor and the voice behind the “Gairmany calling” propaganda broadcasts to Britain, got under the skin of the British nation as few other men have done this century.

At first, no one took him seriously. His peak audience of 6,000,000 regular listeners and 18,000,000 casuals was achieved on pure entertainment value.

The Press urged the British public to listen “for light entertainment.” Another reason why he had an avid following was that radio played a far bigger part in the nation’s life in 1940, with no TV and the blackout keeping people indoors.

But after the Blitzkrieg and the fall of France, people began to take Lord Haw-Haw more seriously.

William Joyce, born in America of Irish-American parents on April 24, 1906, moved to Ireland with his mother and father when he was three. He came to England about 12 years later.

He joined the English Fascist movement under Mosley, but when faced with conflicting loyalties in 1939, went to Germany with his wife Margaret.

When war broke out he found employment as a broadcaster in the English language section of the German propaganda ministry.

In his first broadcast on September 11, 1939, he accused the British of hypocrisy and colonialism and scoffed: “England will fight to the last Frenchman.”

A poll showed that more than a quarter of the British public had heard him, and that he reached his radio peak 25 years ago this week.

Jonah Barrington, a national newspaper reporter, wrote: “A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen. He speaks English of the haw haw-damit-get-out-of-my-way variety.” A few days later Barrington bestowed on him the title Lord Haw-Haw and it stuck.

By May, 1940, the Germans were themselves using the title Lord Haw-Haw, but his “popularity” was already on the wane.

His last broadcast to Britain, the Commonwealth and America was in April, 1945. With Germany on her knees he described Hitler and Goebbels as “barricaded heroes in Berlin.” His broadcast ended: “You may not hear me for a few months. Heil Hitler and farewell.” He was captured in a wood while trying to escape to a neutral country, convicted of high treason at the Old Bailey and hanged.

The pompous propaganda peddler of the Third Reich was dead.

The post Gairmany calling! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

A new series of Granada’s Men of Our Time begins on Wednesday. There are four programmes in the series dealing with Lenin, King George V, Stanley Baldwin, and Hitler. Here EARL ATTLEE assesses the lives and influence of the four men.

THE four personalities of whom I write today form a totally disparate group.

Two of them are characteristic British figures who exemplify in their careers and qualities that process of continuity and peaceful change which differentiates our island story from that of the continent of Europe.

The other two are dynamic figures whose careers have profoundly influenced world history, the one an anachronism, a throw back to barbarism, the other the protagonist of a new way of life, the ultimate development of which is of profound importance to the human race.

KING GEORGE V had the great advantage, which he shared with his second son, of not being born heir to a throne. Brought up to manhood as a serving officer in the Navy, he was somewhat alarmed when the death of his elder brother opened to him the prospect of succeeding his father to the British Crown.

He was reassured by his cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, that there was no better training for a high position than service in the Royal Navy.

Years later the same advice was tendered by his son, another distinguished admiral, Earl Mountbatten, to King George VI, and its wisdom is again illustrated in the Duke of Edinburgh.

King George had no easy time. He had to deal with a constitutional crisis in the clash between the Lords and Commons in 1910. Though fearing an undermining of the hereditary principle, he gave his assent to Mr. Asquith’s threat to swamp the Lords, if they proved obdurate.

He then had to face World War I and give the nation the example of steadfastness and sympathy in critical times.

A few years later he was faced with an unknown quantity, a Labour Government. A narrow reactionary might have tried to avoid this by trying to get the two capitalist parties to combine. Not so King George.

He acted as a constitutional monarch. I did not meet him often, being Postmaster General, but found him friendly and interested in the work of my department.

I would have described him as a good, commonsense man of average ability with a strong sense of duty to his people.

I understand that he was not very successful as a father, his sons being somewhat in awe of him. His son was the first of the Georges to break away from the unfortunate tradition of the dynasty in this respect.

STANLEY BALDWIN I knew well, indeed for some time I was his opposite number in the House of Commons. He was the son of a Midland businessman, but related on one side to the pre-Raphaelite painter Burne Jones, and thus in contact with the circle round poet and artist William Morris, and, on the other, to Rudyard Kipling.

With this background he naturally had a broad outlook.

Though half Scottish he was characteristically English in his love of compromise and his desire for peace at home and abroad. I always felt that, though he disagreed with Labour, he understood our outlook. There was nothing he liked better than having long talks with Labour members.

He did two great services to his country. The first was after the General Strike in which, not unsuccessfully, he sought to assuage the bitter class conflicts in the nation and did much to modernise the Conservative Party. The second was over the abdication crisis when he interpreted the real feeling of the country.

He consulted me at the time and I think I gave him the right advice as to the feelings of the majority of the people. He was less successful in facing the international situation.

He failed to bring about “the great alliance,” to use Sir Winston Churchill’s expression, which would have prevented World War II. Yet he also failed to rearm Britain, which was the alternative.

If he had shown the same courage in facing the dictators as he did the Press Lords, the course of history might have been changed. In other matters, notably India, he showed a forward looking view, thus serving the spirit of peaceful change.

LENIN, whose doctrines still inspire nearly half the peoples of the world, though a prophet of revolution, was essentially Russian. A devout follower of Karl Marx, he got his chance to apply Marxist principles to a great country.

Marx himself was apprehensive at the idea of his principles being applied by the Russians. I think that he had always thought of his principles being applied in a country which had already experienced the bourgeois liberalism which followed the industrial revolution.

A man of tremendous will power and personality, Lenin gave the leadership which the Russian revolution needed and without which it might well have failed owing to sectional and personal rivalries.

He was probably right in thinking that, in a country so backward as Russia, with no democratic tradition, violent revolution and a dictatorship were the only way.

On the other hand, his switch to the new economic policy showed a degree of flexibility and it is known that he distrusted Stalin for his narrow-mindedness.

I recall George Lansbury, telling me on his return from a visit that Lenin would have liked to have had advice from the Socialist thinkers, the Webbs and R. H. Tawney, on future policy.

His views on the minorities in Russia and the impossibility of applying the same methods to countries with a different history showed a wider outlook. It may be that Mr. Kruschev [sic: Khrushchev – Ed] is a better Leninist than Mao Tse-tung.

ADOLF HITLER was unlike Lenin in every respect except will-power. Only in a country such as Germany with a morally and mentally sick people could such a man have attained power. In Britain he would have been only a nuisance and a bad joke, like Oswald Mosley.

There is almost nothing to be said in his favour. A dosshouse loafer with a collection of prejudices which he thought were ideas, he had great powers as a mob orator and considerable ability as a Party organiser.

He was fortunate in operating among a people of no political sense and of encountering no man of character and will power, either civil or military, able to withstand him. Hence his success up to 1940.

I am told that Germans try to forget him and rightly so — for apart from his autobahns he left behind him only ruin.

He was, in effect, a destructive force, resolved to rule without regard to the welfare of any other human being. But for Speer, one of the other Nazi leaders, he would have liked all Germany to perish with him.

The post Four faces of history appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Sir Winston Churchill is 90 on Monday, when, as a birthday tribute, All Our Yesterdays will devote its entire programme to him. TV Times asked Randolph Churchill to write about his father. The result is a unique tribute, perhaps the most remarkable ever paid to this great man.

SEAHAM HARBOUR, November 30, 1964

TODAY, on what would have been the ninetieth anniversary of my father’s birthday (if only he had survived), I sit down to tell a tale of the sad state of what was once the free world.

Ever since 1940, when Hitler occupied our country, I have been prisoner in a slave-labour camp in County Durham and have been forced to work in the coal mines.

My readers are too young to remember the past — the golden, free world in which we used to live. Now the Swastika flies all over Europe — over the Louvre, over the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.

Over the White House itself, and the Federal Reserve Bank in Fort Knox.

People of my generation, if any survive, will realise the full irony of the fact that I have had to smuggle this story to the only country in which it can be published — the Chinese Peoples’ Republic.

All else has succumbed to Hitler. He is now a venerable and largely benevolent figure aged 75.

He administers his colossal empire — the largest since the days of Rome — in a paternal fashion from his palace in Potsdam. He does not condescend to spend more than a week at Buckingham Palace, or more than three weeks in the White House. He leaves the administration of these vast territories to his able but not so benevolent, gauleiters.

For the record we may as well know, now there is an opportunity of a free Press in the Chinese Peoples’ Republic, how these events came about. The year 1939 saw the culmination of the Baldwin-Macdonald decade.

During this time the English people were lulled into a sense of lethargy and apathy.

They were taught by their masters to place their reliance upon the League of Nations — a bogus absurdity which President Woodrow Wilson was not allowed by the American Senate to adhere to, and from which Germany and Italy were to resign.

The defence of the country had been scandalously neglected by the Conservative Party with the willing co-operation of the Socialist Party. Even the timid and tardy attempts of the Secretary of State for War, Mr. Hore-Belisha, to introduce conscription in 1939 were voted against, not only by the Socialist Party.

Sir Archibald Sinclair also led the Liberals into the Opposition lobby with this caitiff and recreant attitude.

All this, of course, is old history. Any of my readers who have not been permanently brainwashed will recall how in June, 1940, France was overwhelmingly defeated, and how Chamberlain called in Lloyd George to play the role of an English Petain and negotiate terms for surrender with the Germans.

They will remember how the Germans, to begin with, treated us with consideration because of our handing over our Fleet in good order to them; how the Germans used this Fleet, joined with theirs, to protect their convoys for the peaceful takeover of Latin America.

How the Americans were supine spectators of this flagrant breach of the Monroe Doctrine; How the Americans eventually in 1943 reacted; How they were defeated by the Germans and the Japanese.

It is too late to lament those events.

Of course the bravest of our race resisted. Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden made impudent and saucy speeches. Hitler indicated in the early 1940’s that London would be obliterated unless they were silenced. Silenced they were.

Now, nearly 25 years later, we are all so numbed by the slavery in which we dwell, where no revolt, no resistance is any longer possible without even a handful of people in whom a spirit of freedom still resides.

Can anything be better than to escape to the Chinese Peoples’ Republic? It is reputed that there, thousands of miles away, whither it is practically impossible to escape, a few breaths of freedom can still be drawn.

At the age of 53 I am too broken in mind and spirit to think of escaping myself. It is only through the kindness of a few friends, who have supplemented my rations, that I have been able to summon up the energy to write this brief account which a more adventuresome friend of mine hopes to smuggle to China.

I don’t suppose any Englishman or American will have an opportunity of reading this. But perhaps it will give a few Chinese comfort in their lonely freedom.

It is tempting to think of what might have happened if there had been a man who, in 1940, could have rallied the British nation to a sense of its duties and responsibilities.

A man who could have gained a breathing space in which the United States might have come into the war.

My father, Winston Churchill, who is little remembered today was, alas, killed in Flanders in 1915 on his 41st birthday. Is it fanciful to suppose that if he had lived all might have been different?

Could he, perhaps, have galvanised the British peoples, with the blood of Marlborough and Lord Randolph Churchill in his veins, into a heroic resistance?

More extraordinary things have happened than this in the history of the world.

Perhaps he could have held the ring and formed a grand alliance which would have beaten hell out of the Hitlerian hordes.

Perhaps, at least, part of Europe, the United Kingdom, India and the United States might still be free if he, or some other equally audacious spirit, had been available, even at the age of 65, in the early summer of 1940.

It was not to be. And it is vain to make such speculations.

All resistance is now impossible, but some of the older ones like myself can still record their recollections and their fancies, writing on scraps of lavatory paper in cellars late at night by the light of improvised tallow candles.

The post The most unusual birthday tribute a son has ever paid to his father appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.